The Protectors war

Nigel was reaching for his sword belt when they heard Hordle's owl hoot, repeated twice.

"When I saw the fire, I thought that Jock had done it," Hordle said grimly. "He was nervous of the dark here- with reason, as it turns out."

The Lorings helped each other into their war harness as they listened to the report and watched the archer draw in the thin film of dirt that overlay the flagstones with one long thick finger. It took them only five minutes to don the plate that way; the redesign had been thoroughly ergonomic-not something that the original medieval smiths had emphasized.

"So I came up quiet-like, to show him why it's a bad idea to light a fire in hostile country," he said. "Which was fortunate, or I'd have run right onto their sentry-as it was, I smelled him first. He was hiding a treat, he was, though, and probably he could smell the soap on me if I got too close. Once I'd located him I went around the rectory side of the church and scouted that way. Six women, five kids and eight or nine grown men. The men all have bows of a sort and good long knives, and there's a fair number of spears and such, couple of axes-woodchoppers. Two sentries out-here and here. The rest all in the nave of the church. They must make a regular circuit of it with this as a stop, and we got unlucky on the timing."

"You're sure MacDonald is alive?" Nigel said.

"Had him tied to a pillar, sir. Stripped for his clothes and banged about, but not hurt bad yet. They had a couple of deer hanging up, probably the ones we saw earlier today. I don't think they'll eat him if they kill him: but they want him to talk, and from what I overheard, they're thinking of keeping him to show them how to look after the horses. Those've got them excited, but they're dead nervous too. And I think they came up from the river, sir."

"Hmmmm." Sir Nigel thought, then shook his head regretfully. "We don't have time to do this with any subtlety," he said. "We'll just have to go in and win, and hope we can get MacDonald alive out the other end of it."

Hordle had been right; you could smell the Brushwood Men's sentry a dozen paces away, if you were downwind of him-the heavy, sour, metallic-fecal scent of an unwashed body and unchanged clothes in a wet climate. Otherwise there wasn't much to quarrel with in his choice of a sentry box, squatting inside a window ledge that a sign proclaimed had once been Odell's Bistro; that was on the south side of High Street, just beside the bend that held the church. It gave him a clear view both ways along the street, and kept his eyes away from the firelight that flickered red and sullen through the stained-glass windows. His ragged clothing broke up his outline, save for an occasional gleam of eyeballs or teeth, and he was admirably motionless.

Well, the clumsy ones got eaten long before this, Nigel thought, as he counted his heartbeats. Four hundred forty four: five: now!

He stirred in his hiding place, deliberately letting his armor clank against a loose brick. Moonlight shone on eyes again as the sentry's head twisted-no showy leaping up, just the minimum movement of head and vision, and another as his bow came to the ready. He sca

Nigel winced very slightly as two great hands came out of the darkness and clamped on either side of the man's head, gripping the matted hair and beard and then twisting sharply. The sound was like a green stick breaking; the body gave a single twitch and went limp. More smells added themselves to the unlovely aroma. Closer, he saw that the ragged appearance was partly deliberate: swatches of cloth had been sewn to the dead man's trousers and the jacket he wore over bare skin, breaking up his outline and making better than passable camouflage. The bow slid down and Nigel picked it up for an instant to examine; it was yew from some churchyard, crudely made but serviceable, and cut by someone who knew enough to use the sapwood for the back and heart-wood for the belly.

They're learning, he thought with a slight chill. Well, of course. Process of elimination, what?

Nigel and Alleyne moved forward cautiously; it was possible to move silently in plate armor, if the interior surfaces and edges of the plates had linings of soft thin leather glued on, and you had the knack. Light flickered through the stained glass of the church; they came in low, and he knelt and raised his visor to peer through a gap in the stained glass into the nave of the church. The savages had built a fire on the same spot near where the rood screen had once been; smoke drifted high under the hammer-beam roof, and flickering ruddy light cast shadows in the great rectangular space of the nave. A deer hung gutted and headless from a rope around one pillar; another was being butchered by two tangle-haired women, knives flashing not unskill-fully: and that made you think how they'd probably learned their way around a carcass, which was unpleasant. An aluminum cauldron bubbled over the fire. As the women cut gobbets free they tossed them into the boiling water. Another stirred it, and added handfuls of chopped wild greens and feral vegetables. For a moment that surprised him, but they'd all have died of scurvy if they hadn't learned that much.

Archie MacDonald was trussed up to one of the pillars, much like the deer; he was naked save for a set of bruises already turning purple, and one eye was swollen nearly shut. One of his captors had appropriated his plain homespun jacket and trousers, his shoes, his bow-far better than theirs-and his belt and sword, which was the only longblade in the group. The clothes were far too big for the man, who was short and had a ratlike face thrust forward from slightly stooped shoulders and three rings that looked like wedding bands through the septum of his nose. He was also a bit older than the rest; unkempt hair and rotten teeth and scabby skin made it difficult to tell, but the leader looked to be about thirty-five and the rest of the men mostly a decade or so younger. They'd have been in their midteens when the Change came. The women were about the same, or a little less; the six children who lay on heaped blankets in the corner ranged from toddlers to six or so. Two of the women were visibly pregnant.

The men were crouched around the fire, roasting bits of organ meat from the deer on sticks as appetizers, the firelight winking on crude tattoos and gold rings and plugs in body piercings. One got up and walked over to the prisoner, juice ru

"He looks plump," the man said, showing snags of tooth when he gri

The rat-faced leader moved with astonishing speed; there was a meaty thump as his shoe slammed into the other man's crotch.

"Shut up!" he screamed. "We don't talk about that! Ever! We did what we 'ad to do but we don't talk about it! Ever! The Netherfield Avengers are real men who look out for their own, not fuckin' animals like them Brummie cunts!"

He punctuated the words with a few more hearty kicks. The man threw up helplessly, then crawled away, leaving a smear of half-digested venison behind him. Some of the others dropped their eyes when the little man glared around; others laughed when he unbuttoned and pissed on the writhing form.

"We've got them horses," the leader said, hands fumbling with the unfamiliar fastenings. "We can do a lot with horses! When the others come in we'll be able to carry all we'll need, and then we'll go far north, take some land: "